Two years ago, one of America’s top five utility companies purchased Interpro’s EZMaxMobile solution to better serve their 9 million customers. Their operations include nearly 200,000 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines and more than 80,000 miles of natural gas pipeline.

The company needed a reliable, flexible mobile solution for operator rounds. At each power plant, operators have up to 400 regular stops where they take equipment readings to ensure machines operate within acceptable ranges. Before installing EZMaxMobile, each plant was operating separately. Some operators used software, while others took readings on paper or in Excel. The tasks were cumbersome and the technicians didn’t always have historical reading data or tolerance information on hand. This made consistency and accountability nearly impossible.

Requirements
The company’s mobile project had two main goals:

Implement a mobile solution that standardized the operator rounds processes across all plants.

Provide techs information at the point of entry in order to make informed decisions.

The biggest challenges of the mobile implementation were standardizing the needs of the different plants and delivering a mobile solution that works connected or disconnected since most of the plants have limited internet connection. InterPro staff held design workshops with stakeholders from varying groups to gather information. Interpro then took the requirements and worked with the company’s Maximo Support Team to come up with improvements to Maximo in response to feedback from the business teams. While InterPro staff configured EZMaxMobile, the Maximo Support Team made the necessary adjustments to Maximo.

Enables applicability functionality so only necessary readings are taken.

Works both online and offline allowing techs to work uninterrupted.

All this takes place right on the tech’s mobile device. If readings are out of the acceptable ranges, troubleshooting information pops up automatically for techs to try and resolve the issues. If the problem persists, condition reports can be created on the spot.

Outcome
The team at InterPro Solutions worked closely with the stakeholders at the utility company to create a reliable, flexible, enterprise wide mobile solution for operator rounds in EZMaxMobile.